Dogs Plagued By Men
Richard Adams is best known for Watership Down (which I reviewed in November of 2008), his wonderful novel depicting the epic journey of a group of brave rabbits to find a new home and a more peaceful existence. The Plague Dogs, published five years after Watership Down, portrays two dogs undertaking an even more perilous and ambitious journey. They are also in search of a new home and a measure of peace, but this time the animals are running against time, away from men with guns, limelight-hungry politicians, and a muckraking journalist, and running far from the research laboratory where they were tortured needlessly and for no compelling reasons at all.
There are a few good men in The Plague Dogs but they remain in the background until the very end of the novel. All of the bravery and kindness comes from four-footed beasts. They are also the ones struggling with moral and existential questions about their roles and purposes in life. Bred to be obedient to a master, the dogs must learn to think for themselves and of themselves. In the process they illustrate the extent of their hearts and the force of their desires. Their Herculean and cooperative efforts underscore the pettiness, selfishness, and weakness of the humans around them.
What is so moving about The Plague Dogs is that the dogs really just cannot understand why the humans at the research center failed to act as responsible masters. Snitter, the smaller dog who had long-ago experience of a good master, tries to explain the researchers to the larger dog, who never knew the gentle hand of a human, “They weren’t real masters, Rowf. They didn’t particularly want you to be a good dog. They didn’t;t care what sort of dog you were. I don;t know what they did want. I don’t believe they knew themselves.” That is the horror of the situation: the dogs were at the mercy of an unmovable, incomprehensible force and no matter what they did, the torture would continue. They cannot go back once they run away, because anything, even dying in the wild, would be better than more experiments at the hands of such humans.
Adams writes powerfully of the twisted logic behind animal research and the moral turpitude of research carried out without care for the animals comfort or peace. One of the good humans recruited against his will into the quest to hunt and kill the dogs (who are wrongly believed to be infected with bubonic plague), states, “I dislike the whole business of experiments on animals, unless there’s some very good and altogether exceptional reason in a particular case. The thing that gets me is that it’s not possible for the animals to understand why they’re being called upon to suffer. They don’t suffer for their own good or benefit at all, and I often wonder how far it’s for anyone’s. They’re given no choice, and there’s no central authority responsible for deciding whether what’s done in this case or that is morally justifiable. These experimental animals are just sentient objects; they’re useful because they’re able to react; sometimes precisely because they’re able to feel fear and pain. And they’re used as if they were electric light bulbs or boots. What it comes to is that, whereas there used to be human and animal slaves, now there are just animal slaves. They have no legal rights, and no choice in the matter.”
The Plague Dogs could be read as a manifesto for animal rights but it is even more: it is a compelling, fast-paced, and complex novel about the struggle for self-determination. That the characters fighting to be free and in control of their own destinies are dogs does not take away from the majesty of their quest or the grace of their efforts. Adams is a lyrical writer, willing to take his animals far into the realm of what we deem “human” emotions, and allows them to struggle and mature before us in a way that is believable, incredibly moving, and in the end, inspirational.
